There’s a whole sub-genre of YouTube video titled something like “10 Things You Missed In <Latest Blockbuster Movie Release>!” Occasionally, it’ll be given the slightly more charitable title of things you might have missed, but the implication is always the same. I didn’t take two whole semesters of cinema studies classes in college just to have some YouTuber talking shit about my media literacy!
But then again, maybe I should chill out a little bit. Especially considering that I finally got to watch Sinners for a second time last night, and there were plenty of details that I’d missed the first time.
On the whole, I’m very glad I saw it again, because it reduced the scope of it in my mind a little bit. Not just because we didn’t see it in IMAX this time, but because I could stop thinking of it as this epic parable waiting for me to pick it apart and impose my own interpretation on it, until I eventually got a certificate from the filmmakers saying “Congratulations! You understood it!” Instead, I can just appreciate it as an outstanding movie.
Some of the stuff that I’d missed is so obvious, it’s a little bit embarrassing. But I have enough trouble understanding dialogue in movies anyway, and it’s made harder when the characters are speaking in heavy dialect. Here are a few of the things I noticed this time around.
The highlight of the movie is still the sequence where Sam performs “I Lied to You,” which turns into the montage of the power of music to span across time and across cultures. Even when I knew it was coming, it still made me involuntarily gasp and my eyes fill with tears. Still just a literally breathtaking combination of images and music and ideas.
But throughout the movie, music is used as a representation of magic. Earlier I picked out the scene in which Annie is preparing a mojo bag for Smoke, and the music (titled “Why You Here” on the soundtrack) that has been playing throughout the scene perfectly syncs up with her striking a match three times.
It suggests that the “background” music throughout the movie isn’t entirely non-diegetic. It represents the magic that surrounds these characters, and it goes into sync during the moments when the characters are able to tap into that magic. Or overwhelming emotion, which is depicted as the same thing.
When Delta Slim is telling the story of how his friend was lynched in a train station, he becomes so overwhelmed at the grief and injustice of it that he can’t do anything but start humming a blues riff and stomping his feet. It’s a powerful reminder to the audience that “the blues” isn’t just some abstract style of music, but an expression of insurmountable pain and grief.
And the earlier scene between Annie and Smoke is echoed near the end of the movie, after Smoke has sent Sam home and has taken out most of the klansmen who showed up to destroy the juke joint. He keeps having flashbacks to the previous night, and in particular to how he’s lost all of the most important people in his life, and there’s a sense that he’s feeling not just rage, but survivor’s guilt. As the music crescendos, he rips off the mojo bag from around his neck, and the music suddenly stops.
When we see Annie again, nursing their baby, the earlier theme is repeated, now called “Elijah.” He’s smoking a cigarette, she calls him by his real name, and in a wonderful moment I’d completely missed, she says, “You don’t want to get that Smoke on him.”
Earlier, I called out the scene with the vampires singing “Pick Poor Robin Clean” and how it tied in with the themes of the movie. That post prompted some interesting discussion in the comments, with differing takes on how the vampires and the juke joint are metaphors for cultural appropriation and/or cultural erasure.
As someone who’s so white that when I submitted my DNA to 23andme, they just sent back a picture of Wonder bread, I’m wary of taking what was intended to be a pointed message about cultural appropriation, and diluting it into a less impactful one about universal inclusion and the brotherhood of man or whatever else. My take on Sinners after a second viewing is that there’s enough going on with its metaphors that it doesn’t need my making up new ones.
The vampires are such a good metaphor, both for trying to enter spaces where you’re not invited, and for subsuming other people’s identities without respect and without consent, that it feels reductive to try to assign it any single, simple meaning.
One thing I was better able to appreciate on a second viewing: the scene where Mary goes out to talk to the vampire trio, and they perform “Wild Mountain Thyme” (also known as “Will Ye Go, Lassie Go?”) On my first watch, I was so tense about what I knew was going to happen, and still coming down from the high of the “Magic What We Do” scene, that I didn’t appreciate what an oddly lovely moment it was. Not corny like “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” not sinister like “Rocky Road to Dublin.” Music is magic for the vampires just as it is for the humans, and the latter scene was depicted as a kind of black mass, a dark ritual with all of the passion but without the connection to the divine. And it hadn’t occurred to me until someone on Bluesky pointed it out, but “Wild Mountain Thyme” is a kind of seduction.
I knew the song from The Chieftains’ version, back when I was going hard into my “connect with my Celtic heritage” phase in college. And it’s another way the movie illustrates people’s deep connection to music. I can certainly appreciate the blues and gospel music used throughout the rest of the movie, but I feel the traditional Irish music to my core. I’m pretty distantly descended from Irish and Scottish immigrants, and only on one side of my family, so my love of that music might as well be cultural appropriation. But it still feels like it bypasses any critical analysis or appreciation and fires directly into my heart.
A few more miscellaneous details I noticed this time:
- Michael B Jordan distinguishes the characters of Smoke and Stack not just through their demeanor, but their accents. They’re largely similar, as you’d expect, but Stack being the slicker and more ingratiating half of the duo, he pronounces “I will” like “I wheel.”
- When Smoke loses Stack, he says “he was the best part of me.” When he takes the cigarette from the klansman at the end, he wants it because it’s already rolled. Smoke has trouble rolling them himself because his hands shake too much, presumably a result of PTSD or similar from the war, which is why Stack has to roll one for him at the start of the movie.
- Throughout the first half of the movie, there are birds, possibly vultures?, seen circling over buildings where something significant is about to happen, especially around characters who are doomed. I noticed them over the train station, the homestead, and the mill, circling in the distance.
- I’d missed that Remmick tells them explicitly that the man who’d sold them the mill was a grand dragon of the klan, and that the plan had always been from the start that he’d take the twins’ money and come back to murder them the next day. It underscores the idea that they were doomed even if the vampires hadn’t shown up; there were systems on systems built to keep them down and from ever knowing freedom. And it makes the discussions about money feel more relevant: even without the threat of violence both supernatural and human, there was only so long they could last, because their clientele was deliberately kept too poor to keep a black-owned business solvent.
- Sam rejects the suggestions that he go back to the church or that he go to Mound Bayou. This suggests that he doesn’t see cultural assimilation or cultural isolation as viable.
- Earlier we see Sam not just reading from the Bible but quoting it from memory to his father. He knows the verses, they just don’t have as much meaning for him as music does. Later, when he tries to recite the Lord’s Prayer to save himself from Remmick, Remmick starts reciting it along with him, then gives his own account of Christians promising his people a path to salvation and then failing to deliver. All this reinforces the recurring theme of organized religion, when enforced as just a series of rituals and repression, as being yet another system that controls people instead of giving them a true connection to God.
More than anything else, though, I’m left with the impression that Sinners is just a damn good movie. It does it a disservice to try to reduce it to any one particular meaning. And it robs it of some of its magic to try to treat it like an intellectual exercise instead of something you just feel connecting with some part of your soul.